1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to food products and to their methods of preparation. More particularly, the present invention relates to ready-to-eat cereals and to their methods of preparation.
2. The Prior Art
Ready-to-eat ("R-T-E") cereals are popular food items. Over the years, R-T-E cereals have been prepared in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, compositions, textures, flavors and the like. Especially popular are those R-T-E cereals which appeal to children. Children are very choosy about food selection generally, including R-T-E cereals. R-T-E cereals can be nutritious, wholesome, convenient, and if well developed, appealing and popular among children. Conventionally, children's R-T-E cereals are presweetened and strongly flavored. Great attention has been given towards providing novelty appeal to children's R-T-E cereals. To this end, R-T-E cereals are frequently flavored, often of complex or interesting shapes, and occasionally colored.
Colored R-T-E cereals are well known. Generally, R-T-E pieces are uniform in color throughout the cereal piece. It is also conventionally known to employ blends of R-T-E cereal pieces comprising more than one color, e.g., one-third red, one-third yellow, one-third orange. Typically, the individual cereal pieces are cooked and prepared, including puffing, in separate batches of one color. Thereafter, the individual batches are blended together prior to packaging.
Attempts at incorporating more than one color into an individual cereal piece have met great difficulty. Generally, any attempt at providing such cereal pieces results in a blending and bleeding of the colors together to form an undesired brown or even gray color. More recently, however, composite cereal pieces comprising an upper layer of one color and composition and a second layer of a second color and composition have been introduced into the market. Such cereals have been sold under the trademark Crispix.
Notwithstanding the provision of an R-T-E cereal piece having upper and lower layers which differ in color (and incidentally in composition) there is a continuing need for novel and visually appealing R-T-E cereal pieces characterized by a plurality of colors in at least one layer of the cereal piece. Surprisingly, a convenient process has now been discovered by which such novel R-T-E cereal pieces can be realized.